I'd like to have some discussion of what I spoke about to see if it is even more incomprehensible or perhaps newly incomprehensible or perhaps, to various degrees, comprehensible. Doesn't that cover all the bases? I would say one thing, which is all Buddhist teachings and practices I think we should have a discussion now to see if I was still incomprehensible, or if I was incomprehensible in new ways, or if there was a different extent to how I was even understandable. But first I would like to say that all Buddhist teachings, Okay, now my turn. Are in the context or rooted in three conditions or three assumptions.

[01:06]

One is that enlightenment is possible. Two is that it is possible to be free of mental and emotional suffering. not physical suffering, though. If you hit the Buddha with a hammer, he will not like that too much. I'm testing you, Buddha. No, it doesn't work. And And third, that it's possible to know how we and the world actually exist. So all the teachings and practices, in a way, are establishing those contexts and functioning within those contexts or conditions. Again, one, that enlightenment is possible.

[02:21]

It's possible to be free of mental and emotional suffering. And three, we can know how we actually exist and maybe how the world actually exists for us. And so now I would like to, if you have any extrapolations or comments about what we did talk about, I would be happy. If you have any conclusions or comments about what we have talked about, then I would be happy. Yes. What appeals to me about what you said this morning is the question of where should I express this?

[03:26]

Where do I actually live? Is the question, where do I live? I don't quite know how to say, but where do I live? Like you said, as if I have a choice to be in awareness, in consciousness, to be in the background mind, and so forth. And that gives me a choice of being at home. And the sense of being at home, the way you've expressed it, has something to do with interiority and being at ease and with the body.

[04:31]

And that I have a choice about that. And my mind does not want to give me that choice. After all these years? I sometimes am under the impression that the main job of my mind is to continuously draw me out of all these different practices. Yes, that's sweet. We don't know who the employer is, but... We don't know who the employer is, but... And I feel like... There's not good working conditions. And I feel like I have to live with that for the rest of my life. And if I really accept that... And when I fully accept that, it makes it a lot easier for me to locate myself at a different place.

[06:12]

Yeah, I understand. Reinhard? Your examples, but also yesterday's and your examples are very important to touch on something. Sometimes what I experience here are such synchronicities. For me, the examples, your example, but also Ralf's example yesterday, that's very important for me and begins to elicit something or trigger something. And what I'm experiencing here, among other things, is synchronicities. Even if I'm separated from this experience and in my rather egocentric, narcissistic mind, then I experience this as plagiarism. And when I'm separate from that and am more located in my narcissistic or egocentric mind, then I experience that as some kind of plagiarizing.

[07:17]

Plagiarizing. This is good. My narcissistic mind can't stop plagiarizing. And so I did think about the northern and southern school this morning and then you mentioned that in the poem. And what Ralf said this morning, that touched me, that I said yesterday. You said yes this morning, yesterday. Yesterday. Also, it feels like a soul story. It could also have been Wang Po, no, it could have been Wei Leng, who is just peeling potatoes. could have been started out like a Zen story and could have been cleaning, peeling potatoes.

[08:26]

But this time it was red with carrots and I think it was in a Zen practice. There you have the task to work, to take on a certain task. And I think this must have happened in a sâshin within some practice context, and so then there's work and you have a job that you need to do. And of course it's not about getting finished, even though you have to get finished, because the others can also be served. And of course it's not about finishing the job, but at the same time it is about finishing the job, because people want to be served the food. And at some point it seems to have been so that he, as a subject, does something, does something meaningful, And at some point it seems that it's not so much anymore that the subject or the person does something meaningful.

[09:35]

So the happening takes over somehow. Irgendwie die Karotte ruft ihn, das Messer ist da und eine Schiene toppt auf. So that as if the carrot is calling him and there's the knife and there's the carrot and some event arises. And so he's very attentive and interested also in being and in the in-between being. this attentional stream happens or occurs. And the whole thing happens without effort. It does help that the knife was very sharp.

[10:39]

Es hilft, dass das Messer sehr scharf war. Gisela? Es sind zwei Worte gefallen mir, die seit ein paar Stunden... So there are two words that have been brought up that for a few hours have been turning inside of me and the one word is perception and the second word is a thought stream. And then there's a third word, which usually we don't speak so much about, but that's something that was very present for me in monastic life, which is the word, the perceptual field. So, how can I... My question, since I've been in the blinding, And so my question is, since I'm in lay life,

[11:49]

And for that I have... You mean, but tell me briefly, perception field, did you say lion perception field? Yes. Okay. So, how can I really cut off the thought stream and fully enter the lay perceptual field? Since we have been engaged, we have been living in the forest. I take a walk every day. Since we are in Göttingen, I have a story to relate to about that. Since we are in Göttingen, we are living in the forest and I go for a walk in the forest every day. At the beginning, I was able to observe the flow of thought and while I was walking through the forest, At first I was able to observe the thinking. And my experience was that when I was walking, I did perceive the trees and so forth, but not all that clearly.

[13:15]

It was more like I could pick out, select a thought, and then with some clarity complete that thought or bring it into its end, into its conclusion or something. And for a long time I have had the experience that when I I'm not in a state of mind anymore, but I'm in my feet, I see the trees, and I'm there. And for a while now, I've had the experience that when I chant, when I do the sutra recitations, the heart sutra and the enmei juku and so forth, that then I am no longer in the thought stream, but I feel located in my feet and I see the trees and so forth. And what became clear to me is the field in which I am noticing I am completely.

[14:22]

So were you chanting as you're walking? Sometimes loudly, sometimes just for myself. Do the neighbors notice you? I'm just teasing. There's that crazy nun again. What I've really noticed in that is that in the monastery, this perceptual field was my home. In the kitchen and the zendo. with the people who I practiced with. And that this perceptual field, as if I had to redo it somehow, or I had to rework myself into it.

[15:23]

Okay. So, but you don't have a usual lay life because you kind of have a temple life. But for you, feeling it shifts more into a lay mentality than the monastic mentality. Is that right? But I wanted that. Oh. I wanted to hear the lay life, because I wanted to understand... That she did too. A lay life is very attractive in the West. It helps when it's horrible and then you have a lot of monks. Volker? I have two questions. I have two questions.

[16:30]

Aren't you okay? I can see. About the attentional stream, I wonder which sense makes it most easy for me to access that and probably hearing, to hear the stillness? whether it is useful, for example, to replace such terms as non-thinking or non-moving with something that is not, that is a negation, and maybe to replace it with something that is desirable, something to achieve.

[17:50]

And I'm wondering if terms like not thinking or not moving, whether it might be helpful to replace those terms, because these are both negations of something you shouldn't do. But could it be helpful to replace those with terms that describe something that we can strive for, something positive? For example? Zum Beispiel? Ja. That's the problem. So far so good, he says. So I'm still dealing with this stream and I feel like I need to bring in some kind of fluctuation. Yes, and I saved myself by developing such a picture of the current going along the waves and the fluctuation, so to speak, of the flow on the water.

[19:14]

And I kind of rescued myself by saying that the stream is something like going along with the waves and the fluctuation is something like the shimmering of the water, glinting, glinting. Yeah, shimmer, glinting. The many small changes. So what I actually want to ask or say is, is it useful to just have a feeling for constant change, without concretizing it. Because in the conventional world, if I look out here and see the house or the tower, So I'm wondering if maybe it's helpful to first of all just have a feeling for constant change or for all the small changes and so forth. Yeah, one needs to start there. Yeah, da muss man anfangen.

[20:16]

And then he added, without maybe immediately looking for specific manifestations of that, because as soon as I do look at the tower and so forth, there is immediately that feedback of entities. A very short question. A small question, again. I have had a certain way of recovering from an experience that is basically triggered by consciousness or the spirit. I have had some experience repeatedly of how consciousness or the mind dissolves. You said that one should observe falling asleep, but that oftentimes is so fast. It happens so quickly. Yeah. And many people wish it would.

[21:17]

I did a follow-up observation. On the way home from work, I had to drive through the forest for a longer period of time, with different levels of exhaustion. And my observation is that on the way to work, I had to drive through a stretch of forest. And driving through that stretch, I would oftentimes come close to that moment of falling asleep. You know, I'm glad I wasn't with you. And in order to stay awake and yet allow for the thinking to occur, I had some feeling as if the thinking somehow dissolves and breaks up into parts like ice pieces that are just kind of floating.

[22:42]

And my observation was that what rose up were often fragments of, I would say, something like feelings, And it always had a very specific, how should I say, I can't describe it differently, like a, well, no smell, but like, it was such a specificity, like a smell. And then what arose was some sense of feeling, and it didn't, but it wasn't specific like that, it was more, maybe more a quality, like smelling or something. Yes. Okay, Rob? Recently I've had more and more the impression or the feeling nobody really wants to go there. Go where? For him. into stillness because it's so boring.

[23:47]

If I have an agreement or an acceptance for everything, then it really seems quite boring. The path towards it seems to be relatively interesting. If I, for example, have bowls of spheres of unconscious aspects, which are maybe enveloped by sadness or something, and I penetrate them and let them dissolve, then that's like a flash. Then I have a very good feeling. But if I really had arrived, then nothing would have any meaning.

[25:02]

Will he have arrived in what way? In stillness. Oh, in stillness, yeah. And if I really had arrived, then nothing would have any meaning. And if I really had arrived, then nothing would have any meaning. And if nothing has meaning, then, that was a recent thought, then the rituals of how I can access energy, they would all dissipate, they would all fall away. For example, the ritual of my unconsciously resolving the... Enveloped spheres of sadness. Yes. And then having a... I love that image. Or if, for example, I have a great importance in my work and the importance is lost, then the ritual of why I work is lost. Or when in my work I'm losing sense of the meaning of why I'm working, then the ritual for why I'm working disappears.

[26:15]

And I keep hearing as if that's supposed to be good, as if I'm supposed to be happy about that or something, but that's not the case. I think when you're at a point where that comes very close to a sense of nothingness and being depressed or something. Then I feel reminded of a phrase by Carlos Castaneda who says that you can only commit a conscious stupidity. For example, that I decide it's very important to kiss my girlfriend or to ride the bike. At the same time. And there's something quite alienated and cold about that.

[27:29]

But in the doing, for example, when I ride the bike, then I can access the bodily information of it and the body rides the bike. There's a nice story from Hesse called... Herman. Herman Hesse. Called The Journey to Jerusalem. Everyone is handicapped and wants to go to Jerusalem. And they talk about their handicaps. No one really wants to go to Jerusalem. And nobody really wants to go to Jerusalem. And when I'm at that point, then I experience a lot of freedom and at the same time I feel that a psyche is created once again. And then that has the quality of great openness and attraction and fluidity.

[29:04]

Although new attachments arise. I pretty much understand what you've said. But some of the words you've used, at least as they've appeared through the translator, I find their implications are slightly different. How they put the world together, I understand it slightly differently. But we don't have time to go into that. But I can say that for me stillness is a door to a physicality of aliveness that is immeasurably satisfying. I would say that if I tried to say it in words, I'd say it's a kind of pure

[30:09]

aliveness that's so satisfying I don't have any feeling of needing anything else. Yes. What I was trying to describe is before I reach that sense of aliveness, I feel like as if I'm on the way from one chair to the other, and in between there is a sense of nothingness. Yeah, and certainly if your work has no meaning, it's not very satisfying. Did you just raise your hand? Yes, okay. It was embedded in the Yes, that's enough.

[31:51]

Sorry. I have a question for understanding something you used this morning, this image of the fishing hook. And that image was embedded in your saying that everything is activity. And so this image in and of itself is something that I can't quite fully understand. There is some feeling about it as if that's an activity that's very active, yeah? So that's something where I had the feeling in advance, it comes to something from, it looks something up or it shows itself to me.

[33:02]

And this ammelhaken, I had the feeling, there I come and take something very specific. So before that, my sense was something like, okay, something arises and it comes towards me. But when you use the image of the fishing hook, then there is some feeling that then I have to become highly active and I'm picking out something very specific and do a lot so that that will come towards me. And so then I feel like I haven't quite captured some aspect of that, something that seems to be important. Well, I would say both of and all of what you said is true, and there are different versions of similarities.

[34:03]

Okay, for now. Okay, me too. Me too. Susanna, you often have something to say in conversations like this. The question that I ask myself permanently here When will you finally give up explaining yourself everything? Explain yourself? Oh, yeah, okay. Was mir in dem Vortrag vorhin, obwohl ich dieses Bild kenne, aber noch mal erneut aufgetaucht ist, ist dieser Hintergrundsgeist mit der Landschaft.

[35:20]

what occurred to me again in your lecture this morning. Although I am familiar with the image, again, it's the way you spoke about the background mind and the landscape. And strangely enough, I am a, how should I say, I love this silence. I think this silence is everything And I love this stillness, and the sense of stillness is something that I draw all my power from, all my energy power from. But now this sense of landscape appears. And that I find very interesting.

[36:22]

It now starts having a kind of aliveness that I think before hasn't been so clear to me. And that arises from this background light. Behind that is the stillness. I think it's a good intuition to feel a little annoyed by the habit of explaining things to ourselves. And I think, at least in my experience, I have to kind of counteract that with just letting things be absorbed maybe into the landscape and knowing that's a kind of knowing.

[37:31]

And then that's a kind of... Known. So that we can know without explaining things to ourselves. Yes, Roshi. I'm struggling with the attentional stream that I'm trying to, or I'm dealing with, approaching it, trying to approach it, yeah. I'm wondering what in the end is it that makes it uninterrupted so that you don't have to take care of it uninterruptedly.

[38:39]

Well, it becomes the landscape and then it becomes the landscape, the space behind the landscape. Also, it becomes the landscape and then it becomes the space behind the landscape. It's just a condition. It's like there's a basic assumption you're alive. It's an assumption even more fundamental than that in the end. You couldn't act unless you assumed you were alive. du könntest nicht handeln, wenn du nicht davon ausgehen würdest, dass du am Leben bist. Yes. So then, this whole time, I've been wondering about what is behind the background mind? My feeling is...

[39:44]

Also da ist ja was. Aber das ist ja nicht mehr irgendwie zu benennen. Und das habe ich jetzt gar nicht erwähnt. And my feeling is that, well, there's something there, and maybe one can't name it so easily, but you're not talking about it. You know, a friend of mine did a... Ron Eyre, now dead, was one of the first producers for the BBC. And he did a long... He did a series for BBC Time Live. And... And he wanted me to be one of the series.

[40:54]

This was back in the 70s, early 70s. And I said no. I had various images why I said no. One of them was, if you film us like you were watching birds and we flew away as soon as the cameras closed, that would be okay. Anyway, we became very close friends and I used to stay with him in London. Anyway, I set up one of the, I think the episode still exists somewhere, but one of the episodes is on Yamada Mumonroshi. Something I arranged for him.

[42:04]

Yamada Muman Roshi was the leading Rinzai Zen teacher at the time in Japan and my teacher when I was in Japan. With whom I practiced the Mu. Go on. He was such a nice guy. Anyway, a netter mensch, eh? Okay, he probably was that, too. Anyway, when he was filmed, Ron told me, you know, they finished the episode, and Yamada Muman got up and turned away and Ron felt it's just like he felt he disappeared. It's like nothing that happened existed now. He just walked away. And when they shot this episode, Ron told me this, when they were done with it, Yamada Muman just stood up, turned around and left.

[43:12]

And it was as if And then he also did an episode of one of the series, which were the, I can't remember exactly, but a rabbinical scholar. A rabbi? A rabbi scholar, a rabbinical scholar. And then they also did an episode with, I don't know exactly with whom, but a rabbi scholar. And this guy talked and talked and talked. And finally Ron said to him right at the end of the program, you've been talking so much and it's so interesting, but what about silence? And the rabbi said, we don't talk about that. Yes, Raoul?

[44:16]

You got some more carrots for us? Mir wurde mal klarer, dass es bei Praxis um diesen Shift it became clearer to me that practice is about this shift. The shift to mindfulness. And I think for years I've just been sitting, sitting practice without really practicing in daily life. And so things happened too during that time and that was also good.

[45:17]

But for me it's good now to get a taste of practice that occurs more in daily life. And one thing I could draw from this carrot experience is to watch how accomplishment or success, to do something successfully, how that's put together. So you can actually pay attention to all of that. I don't know how the Spanish word is pronounced in English, but in German it's gelingen. And one can actually watch that in everything, and I don't quite know what the respective word for that would be in English.

[46:26]

In German there's a word that's gelingen, which is quite different actually than accomplishment or success. Okay, good. The other one was, or is the word erinnern, which I think is a very nice word in German. The other is the word erinnern, translated as remembering. Yeah, or reminding. But it has something to do with inner. Erinnern. And dieses Erinnern, allein in dem Wort schon, hilft mir zu diesem Schiff, And this sense of reminding, just the German word, which is like bringing it inside or something, that helps me with that shift. So, in the way that I remember again? So that, again, I remind and am reminded that everything is inside.

[47:33]

And that helps me with this shift. And that helps me to let this shift occur. That's one of the major shifts, for sure, in practice, is when you really first know that everything is experientially interior, and then you begin to feel that as an experience. This is definitely one of the main changes that occur in practice, that you first simply know that everything is an inner experience, You were going to say something? You did already. You know, Yamada Muso Soseki, who I've mentioned several times, he was an exceptionally gifted practitioner. and recognized very early as enlightened and head of his lineage and so forth.

[48:42]

But he never felt that he really matured his enlightenment. So he spent the next 20 years, I don't remember how many exactly, 20 years, with just a few people building little, literally grass log huts in the wilderness of Japan. And then people would come to join him and then he'd move higher up in the mountain to a more remote place. And he kept trying to create special circumstances, just a few people being alone in remote, beautiful places. But his teacher, the last thing his teacher said to him was, as long as you think there's any difference between monastic life and lay life, you will never be fully enlightened.

[50:01]

And he finally concluded that I will practice in the mountain, which is not a mountain. And what that meant to him was, wherever he practices is the mountain. It's one of the reasons all temples and practice centers in Japan are called mountains, even if they're in the middle of Tokyo. But he was still living pretty much in the wilderness with a few people. I'm mentioning this as an example of a request that's difficult to refuse.

[51:25]

These also exist. He was such an outstanding person as a garden designer, for one thing, but as a poet and a Dharma teacher. Er war so ein außergewöhnlicher Mensch, zum einen als Gartengestalter, aber auch als Dharma-Lehrer. So dass er der Lehrer von zwei Shoguns war. Die Shoguns sind die, die Japan wirklich geführt haben. Und ich glaube, zwei Kaiser. But the wife of one of the shoguns, she really wanted him to come back to Kamakura to be her teacher. And she kept sending him messages, you've got to come back.

[52:29]

You have an obligation to your lineage and to us. And finally, she sets a person whose job was to find him or else. It took him two years to find her because there was no internet. He wasn't on Facebook. And there were no selfies. So anyway, he did find them after two years. If I remember correctly. And Musso realized, so safely realized, that if he doesn't go back, now he's being fined, this guy has to commit suicide.

[53:38]

So he was told this, he could not fail to bring him back. So Muso said, okay, this is... a request I can't refuse. And he went back. I mean, most of us don't have that kind of dramatic requests. But as a person, lay person or monastic sometimes, particularly if you have a family, there are requests which are almost like that. As those of you who have children know, you have an obligation to your children.

[54:42]

And to all kinds of other complexities. Parents and friends and so forth. Okay, so why don't we consider this a good time to get ready to go to lunch? But it's Sunday. We usually make lunch break shorter on Sunday. We have this problem every year. We create it every year. Oh, Andreas, my teacher. So should we come back at two o'clock?

[55:39]

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